Sylpheed and Sylpheed-Claws contain a buffer overflow vulnerability which may lead to the execution of arbitrary code.

Background

Sylpheed is a lightweight email client and newsreader. Sylpheed-Claws is a 'bleeding edge' version of Sylpheed. They both support the import of address books in LDIF (Lightweight Directory Interchange Format).

Colin Leroy reported buffer overflow vulnerabilities in Sylpheed and Sylpheed-Claws. The LDIF importer uses a fixed length buffer to store data of variable length. Two similar problems exist also in the Mutt and Pine addressbook importers of Sylpheed-Claws.

Impact

By convincing a user to import a specially-crafted LDIF file into the address book, a remote attacker could cause the program to crash, potentially allowing the execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running the software.